Aza on the “You-Centric” future of browsing

Spilling over with enthusiasm as always, Aza gave a talk to a recent web developer conference in London about how he sees the future of the web browser. He takes together several strands that Mozilla Labs has been working on and ties them together into a story about how the browser can evolve into more of an intelligent user-agent. The browser really ought to bring the mountain to Mohamed, to borrow a phrase, rather than sending Mohamed to the mountain.

I’m glad he mentions Ubiquity, but I think Aza oversells it a little bit. For example, he talks about Ubiquity collecting your contacts from Facebook in order to auto-complete emails. Getting Facebook contacts is not something we currently know how to do. So I want to clarify that when Aza talks about Ubiquity in this video, a lot of the things he mentions are aspirational — “stuff we would like it to do someday” — not things that it does right now.